Here is a helpful reminder for that side of your universe busy losing their shit: During this woefully misgoverned 21st century of ours, with its sluggish economic growth and serially disastrous wars, panics, bailouts, and stimuli, combined U.S. federal, state, and local government expenditures have zoomed from around $3.2 trillion in fiscal year 2000 ($4.5 trillion in today's dollars) to north of $7 trillion this year, according to Christopher Chantrill's useful aggregator USGovernmentSpending.com. During that time the U.S. population has grown from an estimated 281 million to 324 million, so even after adjusting for inflation, government spending has grown more than three times as fast as Census numbers.

President Donald Trump plans to dismember government one dollar at a time.

His first budget -- expected to be unveiled later this week -- will mark Trump's most significant attempt yet to remold national life and the relationship between federal and state power.

It would codify an assault on regulatory regimes over the environment, business and education

Italics mine, for future death-metal band names.

ReasonHere are three iron rules of political-class reactions to any whiff of budget cuts: 1) Every previous budget ratchet will be ignored, yet taken as the minimum acceptable baseline. 2) If even 1 percent of a to-be-reduced bloc of spending can be described as keeping granny from starving to death, that will be precisely how the whole bag of money is characterized. 3) It will all be about the president, even though the president writes no budgets.

After those two near-death events it's a wonder that we still know how to breathe.

Trump's military boost will almost certainly be approved. His 25 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency almost certainly will not. He's a historically unpopular president currently risking what political capital he has on a deeply (and rightfully) unpopular Obamacare reboot; you think that the congresscritters who are currently fleeing constituent townhalls like rats from an ice floe are prepping themselves to face down the next few months' of "Congress Rapes the Environment to Please the Rich" headlines?

The net result, in an era when Congress doesn't even make budgets anymore and both parties are in thrall to debt denialists, is that the federal government during Trump's first year in office is likely to spend and borrow even more than he's proposing today. That is the real scandal, if one unlikely to break through the purple-faced rage of media hyperventilation.

Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Report abuses.

The NEA and PBS and most of the Prog elite sacred cows were created in the mid-1960s or later. I wish someone would ask Kristof if he considers 1959 America to be a post-Roman dark ages. Really? What a putz.

I always laugh when I see left-wingers long for the glory days of 1950s economic policy. Let's see if they still insist on the tax rates and the return of a few pieces of repealed regulation when it means no more Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, food stamps, EITC, OSHA, EPA, Departments of Education, Energy, etc., NEA, PBS, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, etc.

I usually grant them that since their nostalgia is usually aimed at fiscal and labor policy that often explicitly excludes civil rights protections. Even ignoring all of that, I don't think they'd be too thrilled about that deal.

I wish someone would ask Kristof if he considers 1959 America to be a post-Roman dark ages.

Sad thing is, in all likelihood the only thing that dipshit "knows" about pre-60's America is that it was before the civil rights era and before "The Great Society".

So any suggestion that 1959 or earlier wasn't that bad would probably be greeted by an avalanche of self-righteous indignation and foaming at the mouth. Probably followed by accusations that you'd like to bring back Jim Crow and get rid of medicare/ medicaid, which as "everyone knows" is the only thing keeping old people and the poor from literally dying in the streets.

I often feel like I live in a rapidly decaying empire. One that is collapsing because of greed, corruption, generations of bad governance, and general stupidity. The barbarians at the gates were there because Rome destroyed itself internally.

President Donald Trump plans to dismember government one dollar at a time.

Oh, the fake news. Of course this is going to be Sequesterocalypse Now. Your grandmother will be eating cat food without public television to nourish her. The public parks will be shut down even if they're not even part of it. The news coverage will be embarrassing even as we commit tax dollars at high levels.

Yeah. I thought Trump would recommend even bigger cuts to government agencies and then let Congress scale back cuts. Instead this is a weak cut of discretionary spending and it will still get scaled back.

Well, it is the usual freakout. I'm not surprised by this hysteria, this is the same hysteria that occurs whenever any Republican, even ones not named Trump, proposes cutting any program by any amount. This isn't TDS, this is just generalized RDS - Republican Derangement Syndrome. Or perhaps more accurately, it is GWS - Government Worshipping Syndrome.

Reading through the Trump budget, I feel as the Romans must have felt in 456 AD as the barbarians conquered and ushered in the dark ages.

This near-total Ignorance of how the Roman Empire 'fell' is a pox on the political discourse of the modern western world.

The multiple sacks of Rome in the fifth century were not a terribly grievous blow - Rome hadn't been the capital of the Empire since 312, and even the western emperors tended to avoid the city of Rome itself. It was already fast becoming a backwater by 450. The empire west of there had never been terribly well established as compared with the east. The urban centers of population where all the taxpayers lived were in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. They let the West go because it was more trouble than it was worth - it was a net expense to try to hold onto Spain, France and Britain, especially when the Huns were putting pressure on the East.

On the converse side, when the Visigoths sacked Rome, they got in because a Roman citizen opened the gate. They almost certainly did this because they were sick and tired of being over-taxed and over-regulated by decadent and parasitical monarchs who were hiding in their fortress at Ravenna at the time.

Ironically, the Visigoths were trying to save the Empire from the Huns and from other Germanic tribes, over the objections of the ruling class who didn't want barbarians serving in the Roman Army. When the Visigoths took it upon themselves to successfully suppress the revolt of Maximus, they were finally rewarded with a kingdom in France.

The 'Roman Empire' didn't 'fall' because one party in the Senate shifted some budget categories around.

In 455, Vandals sacked Rome. It took about two weeks but was done in a relatively orderly manner (for the time) and resulted in no further disturbances.
In 456, Ricimer defeated Vandals in Sicily, returned to Italy, deposed Avitus, and the war went on for years.

If Romans felt anything in 456, it was probably "our guy winning is NOT always better".

All I know is that back before FDR the size and scope of the federal government was a mere fraction of what it is now - and the vast majority of the poor bastards who had to suffer the burdens of that smaller government are now dead. Is that what you want - a small government that results in a massive number of dead people? You're a sick puppy, you heartless monster.

Is Kristof's tweet satire? Comparing the fall of the Roman Empire to less than $100 billion in cuts to government spending (not even 3% of the budget, and not even 1% of GDP) is a tad bit dramatic. And the Roman history is bad on top of that (I'm assuming he meant 476. Though the fall of Rome wasn't exactly a sudden moment and the dark ages narrative is simplistic at best).

So wanting to fire a bunch of the people who have been hard at work remolding the national life, is a terrible act of remolding the national life. The actual result would be less remolding of the national life. Thanks for another heaping helping of dishonesty, CNN.

It's true if you compare to similar points in other presidencies. Trump got just enough support to win the election, but has little support from anyone else. Past presidents usually got a much larger inauguration bump as more people in the middle or the opposing side "gave them a chance" to start.

" . . . combined U.S. federal, state, and local government expenditures have zoomed from around $3.2 trillion in fiscal year 2000 ($4.5 trillion in today's dollars) to north of $7 trillion . . ."

While it's scary that $20T of fed debt is not worthy of a daily front page headline, it's also depressing/scary that a giant "meh" is all there is in response to the fact that it now takes $4.5T to equal the $3.2T dollars of just 17 years ago. Luckily, now that there is a Republican in the White House, we can look forward to the NY Times once again taking notice of our elderly who are trying to make ends meet in a world of inflation and low interest rates.

I noticed that too. That's really fucking scary. And it's not just old people that are impacted, a lot of workers routinely get annual raises equal to less than inflation (if they're lucky enough to get a raise at all).

So all it would take to get back in the black (or fairly close to it), so to speak, is to assume that right now we have a big enough government spending enough money--if we don't have a big enough government now, we never will--and say "freeze it". Don't allocate another penny in budget for next over this year, not even for inflation. Hold that course for a mere five years and let revenues catch up.

No big cuts needed, no new taxes needed. Just the fortitude to say enough is enough.

I think you're missing the general idea entirely. I wasn't talking about deficits per se.

Over last 20 years or so, pick a year. Look that the revenues for that year. Then go back five years prior and look at that year's spending. The revenue for this year is just about equal to the spending level of five years.

If the trend holds, then projecting forward, if spending was held constant for five years, then revenues would catch up. Put another way, spending and revenues increase on about the same slope year-over-year, but the spending curve is about 5 years above the revenue curve.

The Obama comment expressed that the pattern broke a little, prior to Obama, the 5 year lag was usually a positive delta (revenues from one year would exceed the spending level of 5 years prior), although not too badly for the 5-year freeze to still work.

In fact, under the OMB projections, we'd only have to freeze for 3 years to let revenues catch up. If we could just freeze spending at 2016's approximately $4T--and just hold government spending to zero growth, not actually cut a thing--by 2019 projected revenues would create a surplus.

So you're pointing out that revenues exceed the expenditures from 10 years prior? Assuming positive slope, that's no surprise. I could also say that revenues exceed expenditures from 15, 20, ... years prior too.

The point is that generally, it seems that

year x revenues cause a deficit relative to year x expenditures, and
year x revenues cause a deficit relative to year x-1 expenditures, and
year x revenues cause a deficit relative to year x-2 expenditures, and
year x revenues cause a deficit relative to year x-3 expenditures, and
year x revenues cause a deficit relative to year x-4 expenditures, but
year x revenues cause a surplus relative to year x-5 expenditures
(and therefore also cause a surplus relative to year x-k, for k>=5).

That time lag of 5 years varies a bit.

1985 revenues could have paid for 1981's expenditures (but not 1982's)
1990 revenues could have paid for 1987's expenditures (but not 1988's)
1995 revenues could have paid for 1991's expenditures (but not 1992's)
2000 revenues actually did pay for 2000's expenditures

Slash and burn the budget. The world went on just fine the last time the government shut down. Maybe if cut a trillion or two and life goes on as normal people will start to wonder why we were spending those trillions in the first place.

The budget PROPOSAL submitted by the President is irrelevant. The requirement for that piece of fiction came from a legislature hunting for cover to avoid their constitutional responsibility.
Section 7, article 1:
"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills."

Congress to POTUS: "Wifey, your budget proposal is irrelevant! I don't care that you think we spend $1500/month on rent and $1000/month on household expenses. Here is your $2000 for the month, and you better spend it on having the Ferrari detailed, and oh, please send $300 each to my mistresses Mary, Clarissa, and Alotta! Now shut up and make me a sandwich."

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a move that is described as "shocking" and "unprecedented" by long-time Washington politicians and commentators, president Donald Trump, barely weeks into his presidency, is actually making an honest effort to fulfill his campaign promises: increase military spending, roll back the regulatory state, and decrease other non-entitlement spending. Politicians were unavailable for further comments because all those contacted by the AP rapidly developed massive amounts of foam after their initial shocked reaction. An unnamed member of the Trump administration, however, commented "we do not know whether it's going to work, but what have you got to lose?".

Matt, what does a picture from Wizard of Oz have to do with the federal budget proposal? Are you hinting that the budget process has no courage? Or that it can get courage from the wizard (government)?